This episode is a bit different. It’s a live, unscripted working session with a founder, and I’ve only done one other earlier this year.
Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners. Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system, and Niels created Mentava to allow students to achieve their potential. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems, where he ran the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session)
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[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:32] What Mentava is—and the toddlers reading before age three.
[00:08:31] Game design, slot-machine motivation, and lowering the hoop.
[00:11:54] Tim’s red pen: rewriting the bio and positioning.
[00:16:59] The real problem: wasted early years, high-school pressure.
[00:23:55] Learning at your own pace—and “what if you did nothing?”
[00:29:32] Dog-fish, fish-dog: readiness, failed trials, and follow-ups.
[00:35:06] The $500 price, school pilots, and videos-for-tuition scholarships.
[00:41:39] Teach a kid to fish: selling relief, not nagging.
[00:47:49] Viral posts, the culture-war trap, and why exaggeration is death.
[00:55:05] Put the ask on top: investor updates and what actually converts.
[00:59:35] The thirty-year phonics war—and it’s not with teachers.
[01:01:10] A $1,000 coupon, zero takers: why the referral bribe flopped.
[01:08:04] Lead with the love letters: testimonials, homepage, and who’s buying.
[01:20:03] “No scam charges $500 a month”: pricing and who you’re not for.
[01:34:16] Uncrowded channels and workshopping like a standup.
[01:42:08] Don’t let Amazon be your debutante ball: testing what sells.
[01:46:42] Alpha School, the competitive map, and the eager investor.
[01:48:39] Reaching the already-converted: be the painkiller, TiE, surround sound.
[02:08:18] Niels’s charge: advocate for your child, unapologetically.
“Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.”
— Niels Hoven
“The metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. You can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop.”
— Niels Hoven
“If you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time.”
— Niels Hoven
“Everybody in cognitive science—everybody in the rest of academia—completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading.”
— Niels Hoven
“Being able to say, ‘My kid can already read. You need to give them more opportunity,’ is one of your strongest negotiating levers.”
— Niels Hoven
“Never ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid.”
— Niels Hoven
Want to hear another episode with someone fixated on the outer limits of how fast humans can learn? Listen to my conversation with chess prodigy and The Art of Learning author Josh Waitzkin, in which we discussed initiating flow states, cognitive biases, fixed versus growth mindsets, the hazards of a rigid identity, presence in parenting, cultivating quality as a way of life, the principle of scarcity in the learning process, thematic interconnectedness in education, and much more.
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